Last week saw the rumor that Sony was leveraging Gaikai — the streaming company it acquired last July — to build a cloud-based service into its next console capable of streaming PS3 and PS4 games. That rumor gained even more traction today, thanks to a trio of domain names registered by Gaikai under the not-so-inconspicuous name of “PlayStation Cloud.”

Spotted by Supperannuation, the domains “playstation-cloud.com,” “playstation-cloud.org,” and “ps-cloud.net” — all of which list Gaikai Inc. as the “registrant contact” — paint a clear-as-day picture of a new Sony service slated to be announced on February 20. Should it be the same streaming service hinted at last week, a large portion of its reception will hinge on the PS4’s overall capacity for backwards compatibility.

In a perfect world the PlayStation 4 (codenamed Orbis) would play old PS3 discs seamlessly, the second they entered the drive, and PlayStation Cloud would spalsh a friendly “Free” logo next to each of its titles that users own physically. But we wouldn’t count on it. With Sony’s (not to be outdone by Microsoft’s) noted ambition to stamp out secondhand game sales, PlayStation Cloud seems like the perfect opportunity to land a full on fusillade. For one, it moves the distribution landscape one step closer to all-digital. Secondly, it seems far too counterintuitive, from Sony’s perspective, to devise a system of ownership verification that would allow users to bypass any standard streaming fee. Even if a PS4 owners did buy, say, God of War: Ascension or The Last of Us on PlayStation 3, how would PS Cloud be able to know that it’s not currently sitting on eBay or on a “Used” shelf at GameStop?

But as with so much of the speculation surrounding the (literal) future of PlayStation, we’ll have to wait until February 20th — or even later, at an event such as E3 — to find out more. PlayStation Cloud could make backwards compatibility synonymous with “buy it again.” It could also, in the same instance, provide amazingly useful accessibility to any game, anywhere, at any time — something current generation consoles haven’t quite delivered.

Ranters, what do you think Sony has in mind for PlayStation Cloud? How should a cloud-based console gaming service be configured, with respect to the physical media that its users already own?

3 Comments

I really wonder how much large corportions with things they want to keep secret hate this public domain information. They want to register a domain for a new thing they are announcing in the future, yet by registering that domain EVERYONE can easily learn about the thing they want to keep secret and surprise people with. I know I’d be pretty annoyed.

Well, the most interesting possibility I can think of would be what Rob suggested in a comment elsewhere, to have a Plus-type situation with a large portion of the PS3 library playable to subscribers. It seems like that would have to be pretty expensive for publishers to get onboard with it, but I don’t know. I guess Netflix makes it work. Still, it might be more likely that they’d just stick with the basic Plus model, and remove the ability to download the title and play locally, hoping to get some more money out of customers who wanted to avoid lag and such. And if so, hopefully they’d compensate for that by making the library substantially bigger than the instant collection currently is.